Review: Black Boxes by Caroline Smailes

I like Caroline Smailes. She makes me laugh on her blog and whenever we exchange emails etc.

And I’m really pleased that she is going to be working with us via her company BubbleCow.

And I’m very chuffed that we are doing the Limited Edition charity book Disraeli Avenue with her.

All of these things, I feel I should mention up front, if I am going to review her second novel Black Boxes, as you might think they influence what I say about it.

They don’t as it happens, but I can see why you might think so.

If you are still not sure of that, fair enough, but just notice that none of my ‘reasons’ include the fact that I like or dislike her writing or stories.

Or her giving me money.

And it is her writing that I’m going to concentrate on.

So basically, believe in my impartiality or not as you like, but this is what I think.

La

Before I talk about Black Boxes, I really need to mention Caroline’s debut, In Search of Adam.

For the record, I first read this after Scott at the Friday Project mentioned on his blog that they were doing a limited edition, and I quite liked the look of the cover.

I hadn’t heard of Caroline or read her blog, and it appeared not to be my normal cuppa, but figured I’d give it a go.

And man, what a book. I don’t just mean that it was a good story, or that she writes really well. Though both are true. It was the fact that it was totally different to anything else I’d read. It was brutal in its honesty and cast a stark white light on the reality of very, extremely difficult subject matter and the word that kept popping in my head was ‘brave’.

A brave book to write and a brave book for a publisher to publish.
Impressive stuff on both counts.

But it was very much the writing – the voice – that set it apart. There is a lot of misery out there in bookland, and some horrific tales of abuse and the darker side of childhood, but rarely had I come across it told in such a realistic, yet tender way. It was one of the few books I have read and re-read, and I still can’t quite work out how she managed to write it.

To come up with that voice.

And to be perfectly honest I thought that it had to be her own story.
Nobody could create a voice for a child character that was quite that perfect, that damaged, without somehow regressing to a child-like state and describing their own reality.

I figured it was either a transcript from some kind of hypnotic therapy, or she was schizophrenic.
Maybe both, I didn’t know.

Either way I worried for her, though typically, not for her mental health or well being, just because I couldn’t see where she could go next as a writer.

I know, call me King Shallow.

Which brings me to Black Boxes, her second novel and the hardest one she will ever write given the success of In Search Of Adam, and her need to escape from the trap so many novelists fall into – that of the one hit wonder.

Second book syndrome, where an author has poured their life into a debut, and then realises that the well is dry when they come to do it all over again. It is easily done, there are temptations to write the same novel, a watered down version, but a safe way to go as you won’t ‘lose your fanbase’.

The public gets what the public wants.

Or maybe some would try to write something completely different, just to show they can, but without the soul and feeling that only comes when you are being true to yourself.

So, the question I had in my mind when I opened Black Boxes was where would she go next, would she hold her nerve?

Not being a blurb reader, I didn’t have a clue.

So lets see.

Black Boxes is the story of Ana Lewis, and of her daughter Pip, and as with IsoA they aren’t exactly the Waltons.

Ana, who you come to see is suffering a post natal depression/ breakdown is an incredibly screwed-up character and one that is in a place far apart from being a ‘Mother’ to Pip and her brother Davie, as she struggles to comprehend why and how her life has fallen to pieces since the desertion of their father.

Ana’s struggle to understand flows through Black Boxes, and the use of this painfully damaged woman stuck in her room bereft of comprehension is the first of the ‘boxes’, that anchor the parallel stories within it.

Pip’s story though, will no doubt be the one that gains the most attention.

She is the teenage daughter of Ana, and has to pick the pieces up her mother has left scattered around, looking after herself and her brother without money, experience, family support or knowledge to lean on. It is a gruelling portrayal of a young girl in a terrible situation, and as with Jude, the young girl in IsoA, it is written in her own voice.

And this was where I began to worry that Ms. Smailes had fallen into the Second Book trap.

Another young girl, telling her story in her own voice, and all my concerns about that voice in IsoA came back to the surface.

Pip=Jude=Caroline?

But I needn’t have worried.

Whilst Pip is affected by similar concerns and an equally damaging environment as Jude, they are clearly completely separate people with patently different voices, attitudes and survival mechanisms.

Black Boxes is a completely different story from IsoA.

And Pip has a voice entirely her own.

What they share though is an astonishing accuracy in their portrayal and despite everything I said at the start about knowing and liking Caroline, I am amazed that she, or any writer, can produce this level of detail and authenticity once in an authorly life, never mind twice.

Since reading Black Boxes I have been flicking through books by the likes of McEwan, Amis, Rushdie, Atwood, Murakami, Bennett and the rest, checking their dialogue and none of them can come close to capturing a voice as real as Pip in Black Boxes. And none of them capture the confusion and pain of a character like Ana.

Nobody can draw characters that are as real as this.
Caroline Smailes is clearly a witch.

There are many other things I could mention about Black Boxes; Caroline’s ability to paint the grimmest realities beautiful with her poetic words; an addiction to typography and page design that makes her books as visually interesting and artistic as the words she writes; the inspired inclusion of sign –language that has already taught my son to swear with his hands, but I’ll leave those to better reviewers.

And keep the boy away from his deaf auntie.

What will stay with me after reading Black Boxes, like IsoA before, is a sense of awe at the bravery Caroline has as an author, and the talent she possesses as an observer of people and as a storyteller.

What I love is her ability to pull you into her characters lives in a way that you forget it is ‘only a novel’.

She is a truly, talented and special writer. I can’t emphasise that enough.

What scares me about all this though is that people won’t get what she is doing. People will assess her talent in the wrong way, put her down as somebody that writes ‘quirky’ books or Chick-lit. Which she patently doesn’t.

So other than to say for god’s sake buy this book, and IsoA too if you haven’t already, I’d just like to say something to everybody at The Friday Project.

I don’t know if you watch the X Factor, I must admit I avoid it myself, but a couple of years ago they accidentally let a moment of reality slip through the net and had a songwriter called Gary Barlow on.

He is in a boyband or something.

Anyway, at the time the winner of the series was a young woman with a lot of going for her who’s name escapes me, that perhaps didn’t fit their usual mould. Amazingly talented, but a little bit quirky, some thought.

Well, this Barlow bloke got hold of the mike and amid the choreographed backslapping said something real.

It must have been live or it would never have got past the producers.

He told them not to do the usual run of the mill production job on this one, as she was the real deal, and it was worth investing in proper songs and production, that she was worth looking after, as she was a bit special and had the potential to go to the very top.

Since then of course, they followed his advice and she is rather famous and tops any chart you care to point her at and looks to have a long and very lucrative career ahead of her, and for everybody involved.

They were brave.

I think you see what I’m saying.
You’ve got a live one here.
And you don’t need to have
been in a boy band
to notice.

You can get Black Boxes HERE and you really should.
You can get In Search of Adam HERE and you really should.